“It tastes like chicken,” the founder and chief executive
officer of Amazon.com Inc. said Saturday night as he put some
goat on his plate. Other guests bit on tarantulas and sipped
martinis with eyeballs.

“There’s a lot of disgusting food here,” Bezos observed.

Still, it wasn’t the most exotic attraction at the March 15
event at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. In front of a
fireplace sat three pieces of an Apollo F-1 rocket engine
recovered by a search-and-expedition team led by Bezos.

The gas generator combustor, turbine and heat exchanger
that helped send the U.S. to the moon, while banged up and
melted in sections, gleamed from a cleaning after spending 40
years at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Bezos recalled the moment he first saw the parts. “It felt
spectacular,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to describe. It’s
years of planning, a lot of work, a bunch of people, a big team
of professionals. We’d only seen the objects prior to that on
the side-scanning sonar, so to see them for the first time
visually was just extraordinary.”

The recovered objects will soon be shared with the public
as Bezos dreamed when he set out on the expedition. “NASA has
agreed to display one at the Smithsonian and another one is
going to be at the Museum of Flight in Seattle,” Bezos said on
the stage of the ballroom later in the evening.

Fellow club member and Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin had
called him there to accept a citation of merit on behalf of the
F-1 recovery team.

‘Recapturing’ History

Bezos returned the club flag issued for expeditions (60 of
which were issued last year) and traced the roots of the project
to when he was 5 years old, watching Apollo 11 on the living
room TV with his parents and grandparents.

The recovery mission was about “recapturing some history
and making some history at the same time,” Bezos said. “I can
tell you for sure, I had a lot of fun doing it.”

As for the weird food: “I still think I’ve got cockroach
in my teeth,” he said.

The program emphasized technological exploration, honoring
Elon Musk, founder of rocket company SpaceX. While not an
Explorers Club member, Musk’s plans to eventually offer trips to
Mars would qualify him, said club President Alan H. Nichols.

In a video made for the occasion, cosmologist Stephen
Hawking offered a justification for sending humans into space.

“Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a
desert island not trying to escape,” Hawking said. “If the
human race is to continue for another million years, we have to
spread out into space. Life on Earth is fragile.”

MakerBot, Shutterstock

Bezos’s company included his wife, MacKenzie, who said the
trip to New York had her reminiscing about their days at hedge
fund D.E. Shaw, and her husband’s brother Mark, a member of the
expedition team and an executive at the Robin Hood Foundation.
“It’s remarkable how sturdy these things are, they certainly do
tell a story,” Mark Bezos said of the F-1 engine parts.

Bre Pettis, founder and CEO of MakerBot Industries LLC, in
which Bezos Expeditions is an investor, and Jon Oringer of
Shutterstock Inc. were among the technologists assembled.

“What I like about this event is that there’s a lot of
failure in the room, which means there’s a lot of people
trying,” Pettis said. “To be an explorer you have to accept
failure as a pretty significant option and still want to go on
the adventure.”